Mobilizing Community-Sourced Stories and Data to Improve Stormwater Infrastructure Design, Planning, and Emergency Preparedness

As the effects of climate change increase in neighborhoods around the world, city officials and insurers seek to mitigate damage with infrastructure solutions. However, city adaptation and infrastructure planning often doesn’t involve the stakeholders it will most impact: the communities that live there. Without their key input, solutions are less effective—and less trusted.

ISeeChange’s platform mobilizes communities to collect and share their own personal climate stories, photos, and weather measurements. ISeeChange combines this real-time data with sensor networks and natural language processing to illustrate community-scale climate trends. ISeeChange also channels the natural power and voices of community leaders and residents by translating anecdotal experiences into empirical data that enable visualization, collaboration, education, and improved results.

In New Orleans, ISeeChange tested our data services with a selected number of potential customers, including city agencies & engineering companies. Specifically we’ve used community-sourced data to inform the City of New Orleans’ National Disaster Resilience (NDR) projects with ground-truthed flooding data in the Gentilly neighborhood. ISC data quadrupled public input on the project and led to four major design changes which saved up to $600,000 in potential redesign fees.

Currently, ISC is working with the City to extend this project to include long-term evaluation of infrastructure updates in collaboration with residents. In partnership with the City of New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, ISeeChange has deployed rain gauges alongside flood sensors across the city to augment the City’s data and understanding of storm flooding patterns. This project’s implementation is part of the city’s flood risk education efforts to lower community insurance rates under the FEMA Community Rating System (CRS). ISeeChange flooding pilots have now expanded to Ocean City, New Jersey and coastal North Carolina.